Harmonies
Testimony: The United States (1885-1890),
by Charles Reznikoff.
New Directions-San Francisco Review. 115 pp. $3.75.
Ideally, the identity of the artist and his personal loyalties and attachments should be as unobtrusive in a work of art as the Bond watermark in paper, which becomes visible only when held up to the light of analysis. Such a position, however, is less taken for granted today than it was a few years ago, for we have entered an age of multiple conflicts whose pressures tend to turn art, as Dos Passos once said, from a noun into an adjective.
Moreover, we know that racial, regional, national classifications of art (and especially the art of literature) are useful and do make sense, though new categories take a long time to be recognized and accepted. Until the 20th century, those who spoke of an American language or even of an American literature were regarded by the dominant anglophiles as hopelessly parochial, eccentric, or chauvinistic. At the present time, the term “American-Jewish writing” is increasingly used and also increasingly challenged by both thoughtful and thoughtless people. They want to know why so-and-so is spoken of as a “Jewish writer” when they can see no essential difference between him and other American writers. The very term “Jewish writer” is often felt to be opprobrious, as if it were a way of consigning a man to the literary minor leagues.
It would be interesting to inquire, by the way, why the classification of a man as a “Negro” writer or of Faulkner as a “Southern” writer or of Frost as a “New England” poet has not generally been felt to be similarly disparaging. It is well understood that one can be a Negro, a Southerner, or a New Englander without ceasing to be an American. Is the answer any different for a Jewish writer?
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Not, I think, if the question were put to Charles Reznikoff. Throughout his long literary life he has experimented with making the American in himself work harmoniously with the Jew. While some writers have more or less suppressed one or the other side of themselves or else have fallen between two stools, both the American and the Jew in his work move together smoothly in the same direction. Born in Brooklyn in 1894, Reznikoff has achieved a quiet mastery of the American idiom, which is all the more impressive to the sympathetically attuned ear because of its avoidance of the kind of sensationalism, smut, and slang which are designed to exhibit an easy familiarity with the national life. He went to school first with the Imagist poets, and his early work shows the scrupulously disciplined idiom of common speech that was developed by this movement. But he was also, from the beginning, concerned with Jewish materials, and over the course of his career he helped to write a history of the Jews of Charleston, South Carolina; translated from the German I. J. Benjamin's My Three Years in America—1859-1862; wrote a historical novel, The Lion-Hearted, about Jewry in 12th-century England; and edited the papers of Louis Marshall. In addition, Jewish material enters naturally and unselfconsciously into his prose: By the Waters of Manhattan (an autobiography covered by a fig-leaf of fiction, published in 1930) and his Family Chronicle (a straight autobiography, published privately in 1963). In his verse, of which he has published more than half a dozen volumes over the past forty years, he has made numerous translations from the Mishnah and other classic Jewish sources and has also dealt with contemporary Jewish characters and themes.
In general, Reznikoff seems to have kept to the same resolution with which Joyce's Stephen Dedalus confronted his proselytizing nationalist friend Davin in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “This race and this country and this life produced me . . . I shall express myself as I am!” What is remarkable to me is the Tightness and naturalness of the relation which he has achieved between his Jewish and American traits. He is neither apologetic about his identity nor deprecatory about it. He has somehow succeeded in bypassing the tensions, temptations, and dilemmas of allegiance that are the rule rather than the exception among the Jewish writers of our time, and that partly account for the paradox that the Jewish writers who have satisfied “the world” have rarely pleased most of their fellow Jews very much, and vice versa. Reznikoff has retained a quality of “innocence,” which to me seems very precious and is the source of the purity of his best work.
Committed to this effort to express himself as purely and unselfconsciously as possible, Reznikoff could never be one of the writers for whom art became an adjective rather than a capitalized noun. While some of his fellow Imagists like Ezra Pound were threatening to disappear down the vortex of Fascism in the 1930's, and some of his fellow Jews in the same period like Michael Gold were being swallowed up by Communism, Reznikoff hewed patiently to his original, unfashionable course. Stanislaus Joyce writes that when he once tried to talk to his brother James about Italian Fascism, the latter rudely interrupted him with the remark: “Don't talk to me about politics. I'm interested only in art!” Much the same attitude has always guarded Reznikoff against aesthetic perdition, and the modest triumph he celebrates in the following poem is undoubtedly earned:
Te Deum
Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able,
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.
His acceptance of himself and his values is so natural here that he can give his whole attention to technical problems of poetic form: the subtle choice and placement of the rhymes (victories/breeze; sing/ spring; none/done; able/table) or the skillful parallelism that gives symmetry to the two stanzas. He enjoys precision work with words, the effort to solve the problems of style.
In Testimony, his new volume of what he chooses to call “recitative” (to distinguish it from poetry, verse, and prose), the watermark of his individuality is still more invisible, yet just as indelible. The first of five volumes of historical snapshots chosen from the voluminous law-records of the United States, Testimony is confined to five years (1885-1890) and is divided into three sections: The South, The North, and The West. These sections are further subdivided into sections entitled “Domestic Scenes,” “Property,” “Chinese,” “Negroes,” (both North and South), “Railroads,” “Machine Age,” etc. As far as I can make out, only one of these selections is possibly concerned with a Jew, a man named Rosenzweig, who is a traveler (perhaps a salesman, though we never learn). It is a vignette of a sadistic incident in which a conductor orders a man off a train in the middle of nowhere at night because he does not have the right ticket. No argument, plea, or offer to pay the fare avails, and the man, wandering dazedly around in the dark among the tracks of a complicated railroad junction, is finally struck from behind by a locomotive. One assumes that Reznikoff found the incident recorded in some obscure old transcript of a suit for damages against the railroad. No hint of motivation for the conductor's action is given. We do not know anything for certain, except that here is one example among a hundred marshalled by the author to show man's inhumanity to man.
The weak and the helpless in these pages attract cruelty and evil like magnets. Animals, children, the sick, the ignorant, women, “minorities” of various kinds, are the usual victims. The cruelty is often purposeful but just as often it is aimless and exists only to appease some incurably vicious streak in human nature itself:
Tilda was just a child
when she began to work for the
Tells.
Her mother was dead
and her father had given up their
home.
When, as is the way of women,
her monthly sickness first began,
she was frightened
and told Mrs. Tell about it:
“That is bad,” the farmer's wife
said,
“and dangerous:
you might go crazy and die.
There is only one thing to do:
word hard!
Work as hard as you can,
and you may still get well!”She was up at five in the morning
and on her feet
until ten or eleven at night:
milked fourteen cows daily;
carried water uphill
for forty head of hogs;
dug and brought potatoes
from the field;
and helped cook for a family of
eight;
scrubbed the floors
and took care of the little ones—
did the work
two stout girls had done.
A good epigraph for this work might have been a remark Whitman once made to Traubel: “Oh, the human being is a bad critter: as the old Emperor Frederick would say, we're a bad lot—a bad lot, taken all in all.” Instead, Reznikoff has chosen a text from Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians to emphasize the necessity of religious resignation, of leaving vengeance to the Lord and not returning evil for evil, the beauty of stoicism, and perhaps the disparity between the Christian ideals of our civilization and its actual day-to-day practices: “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and railing, be put away from you, with all malice.”
There is never any end to the wrongs of the world or to man's effort to right them. In a sense, these wrongs are ineradicable, for the root of them all is deep in the heart of man himself. An objection may be made against Reznikoff's method of deriving his picture of life from cases that had to be settled in the courts. After all, life in general during this period may have been much more benign and filled with instances of generosity, kindness, mutual aid. These are things that never get into the papers or reach the magistrate. But it may be said on the other side of the question and in defense of Reznikoff that there is also a great deal of cruelty in everyday life which evades the nets of the law. What he has done is to follow F. Scott Fitzgerald's advice to the writer to take extreme cases and write about them as if they were perfectly normal. And no one can deny that there is a truth attainable through such exaggeration.
And along with these dominantly somber tonalities, Reznikoff has a balancing lighter side. Some of his pictures are composed with an eye to humorous possibilities, which recall, to my mind at least, such a poem as “Tract” by the late William Carlos Williams. Here is one of them—a foolish robber in The West:
He entered the store with barley
sacks upon his feet
and a barley sack over his head—
holes cut in front through which
to look—
and carried a shotgun,
both barrels loaded with bird
shot.But the barley sack upon one of
his feet
caught on something at the end
of the counter;
the mask became displaced so
that he could not see,
and the gun was jerked from his
hand.
There is no disputing of tastes, though we go on doing it just the same. My own taste has long told me that Reznikoff's work is genuine and far more valuable than is generally recognized. On the occasion of the publication of another new book by him, I'd like to pass that word along to other readers, who have not discovered it and who may be interested.
